2025 Spector Lecture:聽"On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace" by Professor聽Phanuel Antwi
The Department of English is thrilled to announce the 2025 Spector Lecturer: Phanuel Antwi, Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia.
Professor Antwi's talk, "On Being Cuddled; Or, Bearing the Racial Embrace", stems from the research leading to his latest book On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace. Ranging from the terrifying embrace of the slave ship's hold to the racist encoding of 'cuddly' toys, On Cuddling is a unique combination of essay and poetry that contends with the way racial violence is enacted through intimacy.
Informed by Black feminist and queer poetics, Phanuel Antwi focuses his lens on the suffering of Black people at the hands of state violence and racial capitalism. As radical movements grow to advance Black liberation, so too must our ways of understanding how racial capitalism embraces us all. Antwi turns to cuddling, an act we imagine as devoid of violence, and explores it as a tense transfer point of power.
Through archival documents and multiple genres of writing, the book demonstrates clearly that the racial violence of the state and economy has always been about the (mis)management of intimacies, which we should face with resistance and solidarity.
WHEN: February 18, 2025, 6 - 8 PM
WHERE: Arts W-120, 91社区, 853 Sherbrooke W.
Phanuel Antwi holds the and is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He writes, researches, and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He is also an artist, curator, and activist, working with text, dance, film and photography to intervene in artistic, academic and public spaces. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities, and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled 鈥淐urrencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.鈥�
The annual Spector Lecture is the most prestigious scholarly lecture hosted by the Department of English.
This year鈥檚 Spector Lecture will be given by Professor Christina Sharpe, one of the leading voices and most eloquent writers in the converging fields of black studies, art history, critical theory, and cultural studies. It is generously co-sponsored by Professor Alex Blue in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies.聽
Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)鈥攏amed by the Guardian (UK) and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her third book, Ordinary Notes (2023) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. Ordinary Notes won the Hilary Weston Writer鈥檚 Trust Prize in Nonfiction. It was also named a Best Book of the Year by: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, NPR, New York Magazine, and Granta, among others. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2025). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist.
You can read more about Christina Sharpe鈥檚 influence on a generation of thinkers .
The Spector Lecture will be held on March 20, 2024, from 6-8 pm in Room 100 Maxwell Cohen Moot Court at 91社区鈥檚 Law School. Seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. There will be a seminar for graduate students and faculty the following day鈥攎ore information to come soon.
Previous Spector lecturers have included distinguished scholars Marisa Parham, Jeff Dolven, Cajetan Iheka, Caroline Levine, Harry Berger, Jr., Linda Williams, Joseph Roach, Sarah Brouillette, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lauren Berlant, and Andrew Ross.
With generous support from:
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